1,720,957 research outputs found
Information and Institutions: The Relationship Between the Executive and Legislature in Botswana
No full textResearchers who study legislatures contend that groups rather than institutions shape policy. This argument forms from perceptions that institutions are unimportant because power has been transferred away from Parliament toward policy communities of actors. Accordingly, it is thought that the institutional framework bears no significance because formal institutions for scrutinising decisions do not have a great impact on policy outputs and outcomes. The thesis of this paper is that differences in access and quality of information accords the Executive an advantage on policy formulation and analysis, a factor that is meagrely extended to constituency representatives. The paper examines information availability and its significance among parliamentary stakeholders, particularly MPs. It is through this analysis that a critique of the status quo will be provided. The paper is directed by the assumption that access to quality information equips the decision maker with informed alternatives pertaining to a particular subject. Constituency representatives in Botswana lacks an elaborate information system. By contrast the Ministers have an army of information providers (bureaucrats) and hence their decisions are unlikely to be challenged by constituency representatives. The results presented here are part of an on going study and should therefore be accepted with great caution
Information Sources for Public Policy Making in Botswana
Get PDFThis article identifies and discusses information structures for public policy making in Botswana. It shows that information structures for public policy making can be divided into institutions, documents and people namely items in; registries, libraries, central statistics office, staff’s own documents and personal contacts. Registries are used a lot by government officers for their routine tasks and sometimes systemic activities. Other information sources are meetings, seminars, workshops, or conferences; followed by radio and television, and then library items such as books. The paper concludes that information structures such as institutions, documents and people which include information sources like registries, libraries, research units in government departments and indeed other information structures provide hard and soft information within government and where possible out-with government, and add value to public policy formulation. However some deficiencies were identified such as lack of training and lack of relevant materials. It was then recommended that there is need to train staff working in government structures such as registries and libraries as well as an improvement of the materials found within the structures to make it more relevant to policy making
Information infrastructure for public policy making in Botswana
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THE IMPACT OF LIS EDUCATION IN SCHOOL LIBRARIES IN BOTSWANA
Get PDFLibrary and Information Studies (LIS) education in Botswana started in 1979 with the establishment of Department of Library & Information Studies (DLIS) at the University of Botswana. The Department of Library and Information Studies of the University of Botswana is the only credible institution offering LIS education covering certificate, diploma, undergraduate and post graduate qualifications. LIS education is therefore rudimentary as it’s only offered by one institution. The spread of LIS Education to other institutions is non-existent despite the fact that school libraries in Botswana do not have qualified library staff. This has had a negative impact on the qualification of school libraries as more and more teacher librarians could not be absorbed by DLIS. This paper deals with LIS Education in Botswana with particular reference to teacher librarians and their both traditional and technology needs. It demonstrates that teacher librarians in Botswana lack both traditional and technology skills and that while they are receptive to the new emerging technologies, the paucity of training opportunities is abounds. This trend can be seen as a disadvantage to would be teacher librarians. Thus the purpose of this paper is to share and exchange views on the major issues, opportunities and challenges for LIS Education in Botswana and some recommendations
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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